O/T SPAM

[Victor Odhner]

The correlation between bad configuration and
spam is only an approximate one.

Using technical criteria or black-listing to
filter spam WILL cause you -- and POSSIBLY OTHERS --
to lose legitimate traffic.  There is no avoiding this.

Many of the technical filters such as Jean Francois
suggests are not available unless you are running
your own mail system.

Here are some tips regarding content filtering.

"John (EBo) David" wrote:
> Yes I have filtering turned on, but then I find
> things getting dumped into my filter folder that
> needs to be addreses -- like my boss sending me
> the damned lab scedule as an HTML attachment!

Looks like your filters are out of order.
If you get 100-200 messages a day, then you need
to classify them into multiple folders anyway.
Even suspected spam needs to be sub-divided.

Sending the "from boss" mail to the "work" folder,
or simply the "keep" folder, should be one of the
first filters; and filtering unclassified HTML
messages should be one of the last.

My mailing-list messages are all filtered to
list-specific filters, then I filter for some
other sources I want to classify.  At this point,
a large proportion of the surviving messages will
be spam, and I filter these based on body contents.

Messages with "loved ones" or "home based business"
or "get your free information" or "income opportunity"
or "we will include" or "are you tired of" go to my
spam_business folder.

Messages containing lines such as "adult offers"
or "nasty teens" or "younger than 18" or "at least 18"
or "may be offensive" go to my spam_porn folder.

I occasionally visit these classified folders and can
generally delete everything based on a quick scan of
the subject lines.  The pre-classification is clue #1,
since it tips me off that certain phrases occurred
in the body.  So if the subject line confirms that
classification, I can delete without needing to view
the message.  I have found automatic filtering by
subject-line contents to be a lot more work.

Vic